Quotes from Lev Grossman

When she looked back the whole thing had a queer, unreal feeling to it, but then again you often get a queer, unreal feeling when you stay up till four and get up at seven.

Forget everything you ordinarily associate with religious study. Strip away all the reverence and the awe and the art and the philosophy of it. Treat the subject coldly. Imagine yourself to be a theologist, but a special kind of theologist, one who studies gods the way an entomologist studies insects. Take as your dataset the entirety of world mythology and treat it as a collection of field observations and statistics pertaining to a hypothetical species: the god. Proceed from there.

He would lose whatever he had to lose, if that's what it took to win.

You don't have to do anything. This is what you don't understand! You don't know any older magicians except our professors. It's a wasteland out there. Out here. You can do nothing or anything or everything, and none of it matters. You have to find something to really care about to keep from running totally off the rails. A lot of magicians never find it.

Julia had been very very good for a very long time, and the funny thing about that was, if you're too good too much of the time, people start to forget about you. You're not a problem, so people can strike you off their list of things to worry about. Nobody makes a fuss over you. They make a fuss over the bad girls.

And if she liked and trusted the person who asked, she would add that yes, it was kind of a lot to deal with: her outward affect was bright and capable, and that was no illusion, but equally real was the yawning pit of exhaustion inside her. She just felt so tired sometimes. And because of everything her parents asked of her, she was ashamed of being tired. She could not, would not let the pit swallow her up, as much as she sometimes wanted it to.

There is something beyond freedom that people need: work, love, belief in something, commitment to something. Freedom is not enough.It's necessary but it'd not sufficient. It's what you do with freedom - what you give it up for - that matters

You love and you hate and you grieve and you don't even feel it.

Probably falling in love is always a little like that: You discover that one other person who understands what no one else seems to, which is that the world is broken and can never, ever be fixed. You can stop pretending, at least for a little while. You can both admit it, if only to each other.

He'd been free his whole life, if only he'd known it.

At the top end you had some fairies squeeing at supersonic pitches; fairies thought all this military stuff was pretty silly, but they went along with it for the same reason that fairies ever did anything, namely, for the lulz.

But not even the end of the world was going to stop Janet from being a bitch. It was the principle of the thing.

A magician is strong because he feels pain. He feels the difference between what the world is and what he would make of it.

He'd spent too long being disappointed by the world - he'd spent so many years pining for something like this, some proof that the real world wasn't the only world, and coping with the overwhelming evidence that it in fact was.

You do realize it's all right to have nice things sometimes, right?

For a certain kind of person there is literally nothing nicer than eating breakfast by yourself on a moving train with a good book.

But walking along Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn, in his black overcoat and his gray interview suit, Quentin knew he wasn't happy. Why not? He had painstakingly assembled all the ingredients of happiness. He had performed all the necessary rituals, spoken the words, lit the candles, made the sacrifices. But happiness, like a disobedient spirit, refused to come. He couldn't think what else to do.

Everybody's forgiven you but you. And you are so far behind us." "You might be surprised about that.

It turns out you can go home again, if you have to.

That guy was a mystery wrapped in an enigma and crudely stapled to a ticking fucking time bomb. He was either going to hit somebody or start a blog.

In one huge leather-gloved fist Jollyby held up a large, madly kicking hare by its ears. 'Son of a bitch,' Dauntless said. 'He caught it.' Dauntless was a talking horse. She just didn't talk much.

It was the strangest thing, but he was looking forward to everything so much, he could hardly stand it. He never would have believed it. He never thought he would. "You know what?" He took Alice's hand. "Let's fly.

Personally, I think the "Potter" books have too many adverbs and not enough sex.

Maybe this was the only way it could have gone. You didn't get the quest you wanted, you got the one you could do. That was the hard part, accepting that you didn't get to choose which way you went.